For several foreign diplomats based in China, the news that President Xi Jinping will not attend the G20 summit in India this week has confirmed a worrying trend: Beijing is shutting off to the West and its allies.
More than 10 envoys from these countries stationed in China detailed to Reuters the increasing difficulty they face getting access to Chinese officials and other sources of information on the world's second-largest economy.
"If everything becomes stage-managed and there's less opportunity to have informal interactions, if you get less access to senior decision makers across the system, then there's going to be a narrowing of the opportunity to find points of commonality or areas of compromise." He has only left China twice - to visit Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow and to attend a meeting of major BRICS emerging economies in South Africa last month, where he also missed a keynote address without explanation.By comparison, Xi managed five overseas visits in 2022 - when the country's borders were effectively shut due to rigid pandemic controls - and a dozen in 2019 before COVID struck.
Scheduling visits for travelling dignitaries, as well as establishing protocols and ensuring media access, is also getting harder, several diplomats said. Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, said curtailing access or not attending events is increasingly used by China as "leverage" against countries with whom it has disagreements.
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